Serial Advanced Technology Architecture (SATA) is an emerging interface technology used to connect hard disks and other peripherals to a personal computer (PC). This interface is an evolutionary replacement for the older Parallel ATA (PATA) physical storage interface which was previously called Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE). Several improvements to parallel ATA have extended its data transfer rate from an initial 3.3 Megabytes per second (MB/s) to 100 MB/s. However, in the past few years personal computer performance and hard disk drive read/write data rates are now capable of exceeding the 100 MB/s rate. With this increase in performance, the hard disk market has shifted such that a large percentage of hard disk drives now being produced use SATA technology.
At the same time that this increase in read/write data rates for hard disk drives has taken place, consumers have become increasingly interested in storing larger and larger files. A file for a movie, for example, can require several Gigabytes (GB/s) of storage. Movies in the newer high definition formats require even more storage space. The hard disk could be, for example, the storage device on a personal computer, a hard disk external to the computer, or a Digital Video Recorder (DVR). For purposes of back-up, long term storage, convenience of use, modification, and the like, files are often transferred from one storage device to another. For example, a user might transfer a movie file recorded on a DVR to a personal computer's hard disk for viewing on the computer and then to an external hard disk for long term storage.